No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution by Rachel B. Herrmann (review)

Rachel B. Herrmann opens No Useless Mouth recalling a 1791 midsummer treaty negotiation, along the Tioga River, between the nascent Americans and a group of Seneca leaders. During the talks, Thomas Pickering, later to become the third Secretary of State, decided to erroneously recall the history of native food production prior to and after contact with English colonists. According to Pickering's misremembered past, it was the American Indians who toiled hungrily to subsist on meager portions of meat obtained through hunting and fishing along with a paltry amount of corn. Contrasting the piteous food acquisition of the Native Americans, Pickering casts the English colonists as hale and hardy pioneers who cultivated a plethora of flora and raised various animals. The irony of Pickering's mistaken history lesson was not solely limited to his gross misinterpretation of the English colonists' food production (the early English colonists were so inept at sustaining themselves that, often, the only barrier to starvation were the foodstuffs of the Native peoples) as one of the Seneca present was a gifted speaker named Gyantwahia or Kayéthwahken-Cornplanter to non-Natives. Cornplanter, whose name reflects a crop that native peoples had been growing and using for millennia without assistance from the English colonists, was likely acutely aware of Pickering's false history but listened, nevertheless, as the party of Seneca were present for the negotiations to retain possession of portions of their land.

The reason Pickering's lecture is important to Herrmann's monograph is due to the meaning signified by employing stories of hunger and food production in a treaty negotiation. Ostensibly, the United States wanted the American Indians to adopt greater animal husbandry and crop production as part of a wider "civilization" program to allow natives more fully assimilate into white society. However, when the historical context of hunger and food production becomes factored in, it becomes clear that their inclusion into such talks was a not so passive reminder that the power dynamics between Native and non-Native were beginning to shift in the US's favor. It is this notion of how manifestations of power during the American Revolutionary Period were tied to hunger and food acquisition that is central to Herrmann's work.

No Useless Mouth takes a critical look at how hunger, and the attempts at avoiding it, shaped the experience of American Indians (specifically the Cherokees, Creeks, and Iroquois Confederacy) and the formerly enslaved during the Revolutionary Period. In defining the temporal boundaries for the work, Hermann has elected to take a long view of the American Revolution-broadening the analysis to cover from the 1750s through the 1810s rather than focusing on the specific years of the conflict. The expanded perspective allows for important contextualization of Native Peoples' and the former bondspeoples' experience in gathering authority over hunger and, eventually, how the policies and practices of British and Americans undermined that control. In addition to adding a much-needed broader context, the choice to expand the scope of the survey allows for the establishment of a more persuasive causality. For example, consideration is given to the influence of both the Seven Years War and late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American federal food policy on American Indians' decline. For the enslaved who sided with the British, the long view permits Hermann to examine how hunger was part of American bondage and how the freed peoples' colonies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone were shaped by the experiences of slavery.

Hermann's analysis is founded on three behaviors related to hunger: food diplomacy, victual warfare, and victual imperialism. These conceptual activities "exist on a spectrum between accommodation and violence because it is impossible to talk about hunger without considering peaceful and aggressive food exchange and destruction (9)." In short, food diplomacy is the act of allocation or collectively abstaining from food so...